Clear Decks & Desks
Storm Warnings and Elegies
le weekend edition, vendredi 27 Juin 2025
…In which the writer pulls a few pressing items off the pile. You can support his caffeine addiction here.
Jamie MacKay has a substack, The Week in Italy : it deserves your attention, and not only because a few of his readers have navigated to my much more disorganized, start-and-stop page. As the title indicates, he posts every week, which isn’t as easy as it looks, and if it’s an Englishman’s take on the bel paese, he’s upfront about his politics, which are informative. (I disagree with him about everything.) His column this week starts with the sound of jets overhead and covers Italy’s passive-participation in the air raids on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Italy’s PM, Georgia Meloni incites extreme reactions. but in a week in which the head of NATO publicly called Trump Daddy, she stood out from the crowd of European vassals.
On Tuesday, Meloni made the accurate, if tepid, assessment that “U.S. strikes had further destabilized an already fragile region....Only coordinated diplomacy can secure peace.” She continued,“Today more than ever, the EU must concentrate on issues where we can make a global difference together, not on detailed matters that can be better handled nationally.”
The EU, as an organized entity, has a death wish. Did I make my prediction that the slow-moving, bureaucratic icebergs will crack no later than 2030, it just being a question of which country goes first ? On verra. What strikes me as odd is MacKay’s demur about Meloni saying the different countries could work together for peace. The fact that this is so obviously not longer true about the present EU is but one of the reasons discontent grows and arguments are advanced for its breakup or at minimum reorganization.
MacKay included this map of U.S. bases in his post.
These are small city states within Italy, larger than anyone’s idea of a compound, with stores, hospitals, courts and of course, jet runways. A fair picture of the American penetration of Europe. Those who argue that the EU was always an American project are not wholly wrong.
I have hope for Mr. MacKay. He may see the light yet.
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To paraphrase Machiavelli in his essay on the historian Livy, empires must every so often return to their founding aspirations or risk annihilation by stronger forces. He cites St. Francis of Assisi as doing that for the rich, power-hungry Catholic Church with his message of brotherhood and voluntary poverty. The church in turn banned him from public discourse, which forced him to talk to the birds — a clever piece of camouflage.
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And who cares if Iran has a bomb ? Beltway insiders assuredly don’t; they know the math. The Bomb is an insurance policy: North Korea has one; Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine didn’t. If Iran did, the schmendricks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would have to cool their heels and Big Daddy could turn his attention elsewhere.
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Results so far in my idiosyncratic public survey of French attitudes towards the controversial author Renaud Camus, author of Enemy of the Disaster: one spun around like a top and threatened to melt on the spot; another made the sign of the cross, asking for divine protection; a third said tersely, I don’t like those people, and changed the subject. (A respected journo, you’d think he’d be more curious.) I have more but that should do. They’re all friends.
What’s it all about, you ask ? Why is Camus so sulfureux when the French long ago took Michel Houellebecq to their perversely indignant hearts for saying much the same?
“A spectre is haunting Europe and the world. It is replacism, the tendency to replace everything with its normalized, standardized, interchangeable double: the original by its copy, the authentic by its imitation, the true by the false, mothers by surrogate mothers...”
Find out for yourself: punching above its weight, Vauban Books in North Carolina is the place for Camus in English, as well as Jean-Claude Michéa’s Towards a Conservative Left, just out and already garning good press in the U.S.
Camus is an elegant essayist playing the role of Old Testament prophet to a French public that distrusts the political class while staying glued to their sofas, sucking up the non-stop Pravda on the tube.
(Confession: I had a hand in editing Michéa’s book.)
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Did I only dream that Cézanne collapsed in his charrue (cart, loaded with canvases and painting supplies), where he spent the next twelve hours passing in and out consciousness in the midst of a violent thunderstorm on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence ? He died a few days later of pneumonia after his family brought him home.
It’s hard to imagine the Father of Modern Art dying like this but I’m sure I remember it that way. It fits his rough and tumble Southern heritage, his double outsider status. (Degas died in terrible pain in a Paris bed, Monet in Giverny in Clemenceau’s arms. Comparisons are odious.) I search the sites but cannot find what I am inclined to believe.
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Alfred Brendel is gone. There are many stories to tell about this man who resembled a smart accountant but my favorite was just watching him play Schubert, the way those hands caressed the keys, the way his whole body got into it as the piece progressed. He took you to that beautiful place because he was there.
& something else: slow practice. He learned it from Ravel. Practice a piece as slowly as possible, feel how you go from one note to the next. Brendel tortured students by making them slow down and play one chord change different ways for an hour.
Brian Wilson has passed on, too, but as labor organizer Big Bill Heywood used to say when a comrade died, I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.
Somewhere in some small room in a small town that looks out on the mountains or in a room over an alley, somewhere in this world, two people are sitting on a sofa falling love when Good Vibrations, God Only Knows or Winterreise comes on. Did one of the two put it on to enhance the mood or did the song bring them together ? One of life’s delectable mysteries. I asked a guitar player I met on the métro today how a 19-year old with no musical training could come up with that kind of orchestration, and – no pause for a beat – he answered, Inspiration. Holy inspiration.
Producer and I have a tentative to air a Wilson tribute on www.radioolympiades.fr date currently unfixed. Tune in anyway: the sounds are always good, you could pick up a little French along the way and who knows, one of my earlier adventures might be in rotation. I long ago gave up trying to figure out the schedule for anything on that Refuge of Organized Anarchy.
And that’s a thousand words give or take, so enough out of me.